Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Qualcomm Vuforia SDK 2.8 provides a new feature called ‘Extended Tracking’, which allows a user to move the phone’s camera with more freedom. The feature looks similar to Qualcomm’s one of demos in Uplinq 2013.

Conventional augmented realty Apps requires the phone camera to see the target object where virtual contents are overlaid. Thus, the virtual objects should be designed to be smaller than a certain volume of a space around the target object.

Vuforia’s Extended Tracking can not only keep tracking although a target is out of the phone camera’s view, but also allows a user to move far away from a target and interact with virtual contents.

In Vuforia SDK 2.8, there is a new sample App named VuforiaSamples, which is written in JAVA API instead of C++ JNI interface. The sample is an all-in-one solution that contains all the samples provided separately.

Extended tracking is turned off by default and

can be enabled in the menu

If Extended Tracking is turned on, buildings are overlaid on the target

instead of a teapot. You may not see the top of the tall building

with previous tracking methods in Vuforia SDK

Extended tracking allows to look upward and tracking is kept well

Tracking is still good while the Chips target is out of the camera's view

Overall, Extended Tracking is one of computer vision technologies to improve the level of current augmented reality Apps although current extended tracking is not perfect. Tracking sometimes has jitters during in the extended tracking mode. I hope it will help developers to extend their idea for better augmented reality Apps on mobile devices